Home Care Research Forum February 2023

Please note: this event has passed

(NOTE: this meeting was originally scheduled for November 2022.)

A survey of single-handed care initiatives and double handed homecare reviews in English Adult Social Care

Dr Phillip Whitehead & Dr Leigh Rooney

Summary: ‘Single-handed care’ initiatives aim to identify whether all or part of a homecare package involving more than one care worker can be safely reduced to a single worker by a review of double handed homecare. Although anecdotally we know these initiatives are common across local authorities, there is little information on how policies and practices are similar and vary across authorities. We carried out a survey of all local authorities with social care responsibilities in England. This was part of a larger NIHR funded study which also included analysis of documents, interviews with key stakeholders, and developing recommendations and a feasibility study. In this presentation we will report on the findings of the survey to which 76 (50%) local authorities responded. We will present information on number of double handed homecare reviews completed, time taken, staff involved and review outcomes. We will also present some qualitative analysis of how local authorities frame single-handed care, how they understand its implementation, and how disagreements amongst stakeholders are managed. We will also present the key findings from the other stages of the project and our future research plans.

Human resource management in homecare: Managing people for safe care at the front-line of the pandemic

Thoai ‘Lee’ Le

Summary: Human resource management (HRM) of healthcare organisations plays an important role in improving the continuity of care, managing staff, and ensuring patient safety. Since COVID-19, a growing number of HR-related issues has emerged, creating a significant challenging situation for health and social care institutions. Researchers have explored a number of challenges in HR practices and investigated the responses of care providers to the pandemic. Nevertheless, the majority of these studies tend to focus on the context of hospitals, whereas other care settings such as domiciliary care or homecare have been overlooked. Most studies have also mainly reported the HRM challenges without investigating further about how they can be barriers to care quality and affect the patient safety. Therefore, this study aims to explore the emerging HRM issues that are associated with the patient safety in homecare, and how homecare providers have responded to these HR-related challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic.

About the author: Thoai 'Lee' Le is a PhD researcher at the Centre for Health Innovation, Leadership and Learning (CHILL), Nottingham University Business School. His research is primarily focused on patient safety in homecare, and the role of human resource management (HRM) practices on the care quality and safety of home care service users in England.